Morality, too, as a scientific study, will be banished from the schools under Eddyism. In the Infinite there is no more room for sin than there is for disease, and, since man is but the image of the Infinite, he is as free from sin as he is from disease. Mrs. Eddy practically denies the possibility of sin in Christian Science.

At the age of fifty-six, on January 1, 1877, Mrs. Eddy contracted a new marriage, this time with Mr. Asa G. Eddy, giving her age as forty, as shown by her marriage licence. With a gesture Mrs. Eddy swept aside the charge that she had suppressed the truth about her age, and justified the misrepresentation on metaphysical grounds. In her Science and Health, pp. 245-6, she asserts that a woman could not age while believing herself to be young. Eternity, according to her, has nothing to do with chronology, and "time-tables of birth and death are so many conspiracies against manhood and womanhood."

"Never record ages," she advises. But if it makes no difference to a Christian Scientist how old or how young she is, so far as the number of years is concerned, why did Mrs. Eddy under-state her age? In pretending to be younger than she really was did she not show her fear of advancing years? Perhaps Mrs. Eddy also believed that truth as well as time had lost all claims upon Christian Scientists. To change a lie into a truth, all that is necessary is to deny that "time-tables and calendars" have any meaning to the believer in eternity.

One could even commit murder and deny that a bullet or a knife could possibly deprive a man, who is all mind, of his life. Mrs. Eddy and her book, I suppose, will be about all the protection we shall have against the lightning, the storm, or the cold, or against hunger, ignorance, and crime. It is not difficult to imagine the kind of world this would be when stripped of everything but Mrs. Eddy's "inspired" metaphysics.

In the State of Washington the Christian Scientists, as soon as they had acquired sufficient political power to do it, abolished the law requiring the medical inspection of children in the public schools. But who will be the greatest sufferers from this foolish ordinance? The children, of course: the pupils afflicted with defective vision or throat and nose maladies will be deprived of the benefits of human knowledge and experience. Their prayer for better sight, for freer breathing and unhampered speech, will remain unheeded, upon the plea that sight, hearing, and speech are of the Mind, and that bodily obstructions cannot interfere with them. The Washington state law abolishing the physical examination of public-school children gives us an idea of what to expect under a metaphysical government.

And under Christian Science who, for example, will care for the deaf and dumb unfortunates in the community? Material science, seconded by human sympathy, has greatly helped to rob deafness and dumbness of more of their power to discourage and depress. I have met deaf people who were so well trained to read the movement of the lips as to be able to converse freely. What will Christian Science do for these unfortunates? Has it ever taken thought of them? And has Christian Science ever planned or built homes for crippled children—the poor little ones who cannot walk or move without pain? And what has metaphysics ever done in the fight against the white plague? Has it made a single discovery, or given a new weapon to man against any of the evils human flesh is heir to? With this Asiatic superstition or fatalistic belief, masquerading as Christian and scientific, in control of our institutions, all sanitary laws, such as the pure food law, the law requiring the fumigation of houses or the isolation of their inmates suffering from contagious diseases, the laws requiring the inspection of ships from plague-ridden ports, those requiring fireproof public buildings or providing for fire escapes and a hundred other safety-first measures, will receive scant attention.

To see and fight evil is wiser than to shut our eyes to it. The rose is no more real than the thorns which guard it. The tear is as natural as the smile, and equally divine. To be able to suffer for those we love, and for a cause we prize, is a privilege.

Christian Science robs people of the feeling of sympathy, without which man and marble become alike. But sympathy is born of the consciousness that there are pain and suffering, evil and error, in the world. Cognizance of evil is not permitted to a Christian Scientist. Being in Nirvana himself, the disciple of Mrs. Eddy neither sees nor feels, or at least he pretends not to see or feel, the sorrow that draws the tear. Are there not times when, as the poet Hood in his Ode to Melancholy says, the genuine tear is nobler than the artificial smile?

Oh, give her, then, her tribute just,

Her sighs and tears and musings holy!

There is no music in the life

That sounds with idiot laughter solely.

"Christian Science makes people happy" is an argument often advanced. No doubt it does. But we are not discussing "Is Christian Science Comforting?" but "Is it true?" Ignorance is bliss, it has been said; but does that prove that ignorance should be cultivated and knowledge suppressed?

I met a young woman just the day before her mother's funeral who behaved as if she and the woman who had borne her, nursed her, carried her in her arms, who had watched day and night over her cradle and risked her life for her a hundred times, were total strangers. The young woman was a Christian Scientist. Eliminate the sympathy which consciousness of a struggling and suffering world inspires, and art, literature, poetry, morality, and the humanities wither like a branch deprived of the quickening sap.

Jesus was called the man of sorrows. Could he have been a Christian Scientist?

"Jesus wept" is written in the Gospel of John. Sorrow and tears are heresies to the perpetually smiling followers of Mrs. Eddy.

Let us have men and women who fear neither the thorn nor the tear, but who use them as stepping-stones to greater strength. The way to meet evil is to grapple with it soldier-like. Man is not an ostrich, and burying one's head in the sand is a coward's policy.

To live is to act, and to act is to combat.

But darkness cannot be overcome with jargon. To conquer we need the weapons of Prometheus—knowledge and courage!